Specifications are provided by the manufacturer. Refer to the manufacturer for an explanation
of the print speed and other ratings.

General

Category:

Utilities

Installation Type:

Locally installed

Subcategory:

Utilities - storage virtualization

Header

Brand:

VMware

Compatibility:

PC

Manufacturer:

VMware GSA

Model:

Advanced for Desktop

Packaged Quantity:

1

Product Line:

VMware Virtual SAN

Licensing

License Pricing:

Federal government , Volume

Licensing Details:

U.S. Federal only

Pricing Level:

Level 1

Pricing Range:

50-599

Software

License Category:

License

License Qty:

10 CCU

License Type:

Upgrade license

Licensing Program:

VMware Transactional Purchasing Program (TPP)

Upgrade from:

Standard

Version:

6

Software Upgrade Details

Software Type:

VMware Virtual SAN for Desktop Standard

Version:

6

System Requirements

Software Requirements:

VMware vSphere 6 or higher

Product Reviews

VMware Virtual SAN Advanced for Desktop (v. 6) - upgrade license is rated 4.1 out of 5 by 27.

Rated 5 out of 5 by ThiagoSouza from In a production environment, it increases provisioning, security and provides faster deployment.Valuable Features:The most valuable features are:* Automation* RecoverPoint for VMware* Self-healing capabilityIn a production environment, these features ramp up the provisioning, security and provides faster deployment.Room for Improvement:There is not much improvement needed. If you work with the HC Platform, vSAN is not directly touched, i.e., once the HC appliance takes care of it.Use of Solution:I have used this solution for nine months (but only for sales proposal, it has not been implemented, just technical sales information).Stability Issues:I did not encounter any stability issues.Scalability Issues:I did not encounter any scalability issues.Technical Support:Always when I was in need of any technical support, I was promptly answered by them.Initial Setup:As I have worked with the HC Platform, the setup was very simple and easy.Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing:For Latin America, the costs are very higher; even if you go deep on functionalities, but still it is sellable.Other Advice:Work hard on the sizing matters.Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:We are a business partner.

Date published: 2017-07-15

Rated 4 out of 5 by DennisLefeber from The most valuable feature is its simplicity of implementation.Valuable Features:The feature that is most valuable is the simplicity of implementation, as you only have to enable the feature on the already existing cluster(s).Improvements to My Organization:For a PaaS platform which I’ve developed the scalability of VMware, vSAN was a necessary feature as we could grow with the onboard customers.Room for Improvement:As the product is very scalable, it is not scalable in a way that the different host sizes could effectively be added to an existing cluster. All the hosts/disk configuration has to be consistent, for a consistent performance experience.Use of Solution:I’ve been using VMware vSAN for about two years, i.e., since VMware vSAN 6.0 was released.Stability Issues:The stability of VMware vSAN 6.0 is good, you sometimes have to resynchronize the data over the cluster (which is a single button task).Scalability Issues:As stated earlier, all the hosts have to be exactly the same for a consistent performance experience, which limits the scalability of the product. Also, the computer and storage components within the HCI solution are linked to each other, it’s not possible to add only storage nodes.Technical Support:The documentation of VMware vSAN is good. I’ve had no experience with VMware support regarding vSAN.Previous Solutions:I haven’t used a different HCI solution before.Initial Setup:The initial setup is really straightforward, you only have to enable it on the VMware cluster. But, before the initial setup you will have to check the HCL of vSAN for the compatibility of the different components. With VMware vSAN ready nodes, this process is made simple, but it still is something you have to take in consideration.Cost and Licensing Advice:VMware vSAN is licensed per CPU and the cost is to the other VMware (and Microsoft) product. VMware vSAN is reasonable priced, but with the addition of more nodes to the cluster, the needed CPU licenses (for VMware/Microsoft/etc) are increasing rapidly, which makes it an expensive solution.Other Solutions Considered:I’ve looked at SimpliVity, but it has a special hardware requirement whereby it failed in terms of the project-requirements.Other Advice:Use VMware vSAN for special use-cases only and don’t use it as an all-purpose storage solution.Use VMware vSAN for VDI, small VSI, and dev-test environments. Don’t use it for messaging/database solutions as the licensing costs are huge.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2017-07-06

Rated 4 out of 5 by Adnan Majeed from It provides high availability without needing a full vCentre/host license or a physical SAN. There are bugs in the SAN Health Check utility.Valuable Features:* HA* No physical SAN overheadHaving high availability without the need for a full vCentre/host license is a plus that, along with not needing a physical SAN, makes this solution great when you need functionality without the extra overhead of additional hardware and licences.Improvements to My Organization:It accelerated our P2V plan.Room for Improvement:There are bugs in the SAN Health Check utility. It misreports latency issues when the hosts are actual within the correct tolerances. I have been on the phone with VMware about this and they have said it’s a bug.Use of Solution:I have used it for 10 months.Stability Issues:I have not encountered any stability issues yet.Scalability Issues:We have not crossed this bridge yet.Technical Support:So far, technical support is 8/10.Previous Solutions:We did not previously use a different solution.Initial Setup:Initial setup was straightforward.Cost and Licensing Advice:Licensing is fairly straightforward.Other Solutions Considered:Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.Other Advice:Take a look at the network requirements and use 10GbE.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2017-05-26

Rated 4 out of 5 by SeniorSy7ca6 from You can set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level.Valuable Features:* Allows for very easy administration* You don't have LUNs to set up and assign* The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level* Allows for different setups for different workload requirementsImprovements to My Organization:* Allows for the expansion of our public library patron computer environment into a three-node VMware cluster using commodity servers* Eliminates the need for expensive disk arrays and controllers* Provides greater reliability and performanceUse of Solution:We have been using vSAN in one environment for about eight months and in another environment for about four months.Deployment Issues:The only issue I encountered during deployment was with the hardware and not with vSAN itself.The disks in the new servers were installed at the factory as RAID disks. I had to mark them as non-RAID disks so that vSAN would be able to see them correctly in order to add them to disk groups.Stability Issues:There have been no issues with stability.Scalability Issues:We have had no issues with scalability.Technical Support:Fortunately, I have not had to contact support for any issues with my implementations.Previous Solutions:We chose VMware vSAN for these reasons:* It is part of the ESXi kernel. This allows for the product to be very fast with little overhead.* It is included in the Enterprise Plus version of ESXi. Compared with competing products, it provides great cost savings.We have a Nutanix environment running in production as well.Initial Setup:The initial setup was straightforward as was learning the vSAN environment.The complexity comes in setting up and managing the storage policies. These can be simple or complex depending on the environment.When using VMware Horizon View, there are several storage policies that are auto-created and managed. Creating and managing your own policies and rule sets depend on your needs and workloads.ROI:VMware vSAN is included in the enterprise plus level of software that we purchased. Our cost savings were due to buying commodity server hardware with local hard drives instead of investing in large SAN hardware.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2017-03-20

Rated 4 out of 5 by Harri Waltari from There is no need to manage separate storage areas in SAN/NAS environments. Storage management comes built-in.Valuable Features:The most important feature for us is the converged infrastructure, which is all this tool is about. There is no need to manage separate storage areas in SAN/NAS environments. Storage management comes built-in with the vSAN tool. Storage is managed via policies. Define a policy and apply it to the datastore/virtual machine and the software-defined storage does the rest. These are valuable features.Scalability and future upgrades are a piece of cake. If you want more IOPS, then add disk groups and/or nodes on the fly. If you want to upgrade the hardware, then add new servers and retire the old ones. No service breaks at all.The feature that we have not yet implemented but are looking at, is the ability to extend the cluster to our other site in order to handle DR situations.Improvements to My Organization:Provisioning virtual machines has been simplified, as there is no provisioning/management of the separate storage layer and it is no more in question.Room for Improvement:The management client, i.e., the Flash-based client, is just not up to the mark. I’m really waiting for the HTML5 client to be fully ready and all the features are implemented to it. This, of course, is not a vSAN issue but a vSphere issue.Use of Solution:I have used this solution for around a year.Stability Issues:Stability has not been an issue for us. We have not run into any serious software faults. VMware ESXi is a mature product with very few problems and today, vSAN is also getting there.Scalability Issues:The scalability of the product is way beyond our needs.Technical Support:L1 technical support, which I have mostly been dealing with, has been pretty solid, especially the guys in Ireland, who do handle it pretty well, both technically and in reference to the customer service aspect.Previous Solutions:We did not have any comparable solution previously. We did previously use traditional SAN / NAS environments from where the storage areas were provisioned for the VMware clusters.Initial Setup:The initial setup was quite straightforward. All in all, it took three days to complete the entire process; that included installation of the hardware itself, installation of ESXi onto the hardware, creating the data center and the cluster, configuring the networks and multicasting on the surrounding network infrastructure, defining all the disk groups and networks at the cluster, and finally turning the vSAN on. vSAN was the simplest part of the whole process.Cost and Licensing Advice:As VMware products are licensed per number of sockets, you need to think this fully through. However, don’t go cheap on the number of hosts. You’ll thank me later.Other Solutions Considered:We got presentations both from SimpliVity and Nutanix. No serious evaluation of other products was made. We did evaluate vSAN a couple months before the purchase, so as to get familiar with it, and we do have a lab environment now to play with.In hindsight, we could have carried out a more-thorough evaluation of vSAN to get a really good feel about it; maybe even run a part of your actual production there for an extended period of time to see all the pros and cons.Other Advice:Study the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) carefully with your server hardware provider and make sure all the components/firmware versions are on the HCL; either that or buy predefined hardware, a.k.a. vSAN-ready nodes, from a certified vendor. Always make sure that the hardware and firmware levels are on par with the HCL. You may have to upgrade; for example, you may need to upgrade the disk controller firmware when the updates to ESXi are installed. VMware does a pretty good job here and vCenter tells you that there are inconsistencies. However, you should still be prepared for that in advance, before actually installing the updates.Don’t go with the minimum number of (storage) nodes, as that won’t give you enough room for a hardware failure during a scheduled maintenance break. For a minimum setup, without advanced options in vSAN 6.5 such as deduplication, compression and when Failures to Tolerate (FTT) = 1, the required number of nodes is three. VMware recommends in best practices a minimum number of four nodes. Do yourself a favour and go with at least that or even five would be good.When disk groups are designed, it is always better to have more smaller disk groups than a few larger disk groups. This increases your availability, decreases time to heal from disk troubles and gives you an improved performance, as there are more cache devices.If your budget allows it, then go with the all-flash storage. If not, go with even more disk groups. Our cluster has pretty good performance; although we have spinning disks, the read latency usually stays below 1ms and write latency stays below 2ms.Plan your network infrastructure carefully, especially that part which handles the vSAN traffic. Go with separate 10G switches and dual interfaces for each server just for vSAN. Handle the virtual machine traffic, migration traffic and management traffic elsewhere. Go with 10G or faster, if you need that. Don’t use 1G for vSAN traffic, unless your environment is really small or is a lab.Plan your backup / restore strategy really well and test it through. Test restore periodically for both full virtual machines and single files inside virtual machines. To carry out test restore is always important, but with vSAN it is even more so, as all your eggs are in the same basket and there are no more traditional .vmdk files that you can fiddle with. A separate test / lab vSAN cluster would be really good to test various things such as installing updates, restoring backups etc.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2017-03-13

Rated 4 out of 5 by SeniorCo7313 from Policies can be applied per virtual disk instead of applied on an entire volume.Valuable Features:I like this solution because policies (such as resiliency) are applied per virtual disk instead of applied on an entire volume.In a standard SAN solution, and in almost all software-defined storage solutions, the resiliency is applied to an entire volume. For example, you create a volume (or LUN) and you choose RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 and so on. With vSAN, the notion of volume that we know with SAN doesn’t exist. Instead we have VVOL. Thanks to this, we can apply specific settings like the resiliency per virtual disk. It is more flexible because we don’t need to dedicate an entire volume for a specific resiliency.Improvements to My Organization:I’m a consultant, so I don’t have vSAN in my organization. But customers take this solution to increase efficiency, scalability and ease of management.Room for Improvement:Currently, vSAN supports stretched cluster. You need to have the exact same number of nodes in each room and only the RAID 1 resiliency is supported. I hope in the future that vSAN supports also the RAID 5 and RAID 6 resiliency mode for stretched cluster.Use of Solution:I have been working with this solution for seven months.Stability Issues:Some customers report that resync doesn’t work very well.Scalability Issues:We have not had scalability issues.Technical Support:I rate technical support 3.5/5.Previous Solutions:As a consultant, I use different solutions, such as Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, and Nutanix.Initial Setup:The initial setup is straightforward because a wizard helps you to enable vSAN.Cost and Licensing Advice:The license price is too expensive compared to other market actors.Other Solutions Considered:I will evaluate alternatives depending on customer’s needs, but I compare it with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Nutanix.Other Advice:Be careful about the chosen hardware, especially HBA, storage devices and CPU depending on deduplication or not.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2017-03-12

Rated 4 out of 5 by SeniorSy7ca6 from We can set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level.Valuable Features:I find that vSAN allows for very easy administration. The fact that you don't have LUNs to set up and assign is great. The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level is also a great part of this product. You can allow for different setups for different workload requirements.Improvements to My Organization:vSAN allowed for the expansion of our Public Library Patron computer environment into a three-node VMware cluster using commodity servers. This eliminated the need for expensive disk arrays and controllers while providing greater reliability and performance.Use of Solution:We have been using vSAN in one environment for about eight months and another environment for about four months.Deployment Issues:The only issue I encountered during deployment was with the hardware and not with vSAN itself. The disks in the new servers were installed at the factory as RAID disks. I had to mark them as non-RAID disks, so that vSAN would be able to see them correctly for addition to disk groups.Stability Issues:We have had no issues with stability.Technical Support:Fortunately, I have not had to contact support for any issues with my implementations.Previous Solutions:We have a Nutanix environment running in production as well. We chose VMware vSAN for several reasons. First, the vSAN solution is part of the ESXi kernel. This allows for the product to be very fast with little overhead. Secondly, vSAN is included in the Enterprise Plus version of ESXi which, compared to competing products, provides a great cost savings.Initial Setup:The initial setup was straightforward, as was learning the vSAN environment. The complexity comes in setting up and managing the storage policies. These can be simple or complex depending on the environment. When using VMware Horizon View, there are several storage policies that are auto-created and -managed. Creating and managing your own policies and rule sets depend on your needs and workloads.ROI:VMware vSAN is included in the Enterprise Plus level of software that we purchase. Our cost savings is in buying commodity server hardware with local hard drives instead of investing in large SAN hardware.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2017-03-07

Rated 4 out of 5 by Mike Solovyev from We are a service provider and we build IaaS clusters on top of it.Valuable Features:In our model, the price of vSAN storage space is a bit lower than SATA-based storage space from other storages, and vSAN usually has better characteristics (IOPS + latency).We can easily scale up our vSAN cluster horizontally. All we need is to buy the same hardware nodes and put them in racks.vSAN has better integration with virtualization than any other datastore.Stretched All Flash vSAN is the leading product to build a disaster recovery solution. We have a plan to build it in near future.Improvements to My Organization:It’s simple: We are service provider and if a solution can give us new opportunities, it is a good solution. We can build economically effective IaaS clusters on top of vSAN.Room for Improvement:vSAN is very complex inside. For example, you need to have a plan for any emergency situation, beginning from the PoC stage; how you monitor SSD and HDD; how you change them. It looks simple, but you cannot just remove a broken component and an install new one. Under the vSAN layer, you need many accurate steps to make these simple actions.And when you operate a big environment, you need to have more tools to control the health of the solution, to troubleshoot issues and so on. VMware has improved this side from 5.5 to 6.5, and there’s still room for it.vSAN is not a hardware-agnostic product. We would like to have more compatible SAS controllers and other components in the market. There is room for improvement for both hardware vendors and for VMware.On the other hand, vSAN is a production-ready solution and all these possible improvements are cosmetic issues.Use of Solution:We have used it from the vSAN 5.5 release date, more than two years.We use VMware vSAN 5.5 with the latest updates in our products.The first product is a B2B sector solution, CloudLine, and we sell space on vSAN as one of the storage tiers.The second one is our B2C solution, CloudLite.ru. It looks like Digital Ocean – we sell IaaS to retail customers in the mass market.We have plans to build new clusters using vSAN 6.5.Stability Issues:We have encountered stability issues. We had run many tests with vSAN before production. To avoid any issues with vSAN stability, one needs HCL hardware and compatible BIOS drivers for each of the components. The crucial part is that you need HBA without RAID and with disk pass-through, which is important. Finally, you need strong network expertise and a solid network.Scalability Issues:We have not encountered any scalability issues; you can scale vSAN horizontally without any issues. But you need to start from 5 (!) nodes; not 3 or 4. It’s a long story – why? :)Technical Support:Rating technical support is not a simple question. VMware has great technical experts at level 2 and 3, and they are always available if you have severity 1 issue. Technical support is not so good for minor issues.Previous Solutions:Previously we use traditional datastores - NetApp, EMC, IBM. And we continue to use it.Initial Setup:Initially, you need to have enough expertise. You need to read some popular bloggers and select hardware from “recommended nodes”. And then you can start a PoC.Cost and Licensing Advice:We are part of the VMware vCAN program, so our licensing is different from the retail model and it’s comfortable for us.Other Solutions Considered:We keep an eye on all solutions that come to the market. We have tested SimpliVity and Nutanix. We use MS Storage Spaces in our production. All these products have their pros and cons.Other Advice:You need to use it for the reason of economical efficiency. It’s one of VMware’s great products.vSAN is a great product, and we see improvement from 5.5 to 6 and 6.5.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.